Acceptance of AI for delegating emotional intelligence: Results from an experiment

Detecting emotions of other humans is challenging for us humans. It is however important in many social contexts so that many individuals seek help in this regard. As technology is evolving, more and more AI-based options emerge that promise to detect human emotions and support decision making. We focus on the full delegation of detecting emotions to AI to contribute to our understanding how such AI is perceived and why it is accepted. For this, we conduct an online scenario-based experiment in which participants have the choice to delegate emotion detection to another human in one group and to an AI tool in the other group. Our results show that the delegation rates are higher for a human, but surprisingly high for AI. The results provide insights that should be considered when designing AI-based emotion-detection tools to build trustworthy and accepted designs.